Well I have now made an official night dive~! It was every bit as creepy and exciting as I thought it would be. I have made several night dives while I was skydiving and thought that experience would help me taking a plunge into dark water. Nope, nope, nope…. The way the Dive master handled this one though helped a lot. We actually entered the water with about 20 minutes of ‘daylight’ left, so the darkness kind of creeped up on me, but I think it made the experience better. I wasn’t quite as creeped out. By the time I realized it was pitch black around me, I had got mostly comfortable with the fact that my vision was limited to just what I could see in the beam of my flashlight. There were several other divers on the dive so I had a little bit of their light beams as well – but I grew tired of them all around me and slid out to places a little farther away from them so the water wasn’t as stirred up. I’m getting a tad ahead of myself here though….. I started out by making an earlier dive there at the Frederiksted pier…… water clarity left a lot to be desired, but that is the luck of the draw on any dive. The dive started out right off the bat by me spotting a small fish that had a hook in his mouth with some line attached to a small weight on the end. He could swim, but not very far before the weight pulled him down. I could not in good conscious, continue my dive without trying to help him, so I took off after him. As it turns out, my camera was on video and was running when I took off after him, and you can see him in the very beginning of the video. I finally caught him. The hook was lodged too deep in his mouth to safely take it out, so I cut the line and weight off of it and let him go. He swam away and all I could do was hope he makes it. Lots of fish on the first dive, but water clarity and visibility made getting decent pictures a challenge. We wrapped the dive up at 53 minutes and got out to wait for the nitrogen in our blood to dissipate before we geared up for the night dive.
The night dive offered up tons and tons of sea life…. a couple of spotted moray eels, a turtle, a bunch of massive lobsters, star fish~! an octopus and a go-zillion banded sea shrimp. I took a total of 234 pictures and 9 videos during that day yesterday…… unfortunately….. I learned the very hard humbling way – that I knew nothing about shooting pictures underwater, at night with nasty water clarity….. weirdly, the videos came out fairly decent, but don’t know if any of them are small enough to get on here – so if they’re not – you’ll have to go to FB to see them. I wound up saving a total of 67 pictures after I weeded out the junk shots….. but I learned a bunch on that night dive…….. since I’m already over my word limit….. I’ll quit here and put up some pictures and maybe chat about it some more tomorrow…….
Good night Ya’ll —– Thankx for stopping in~!
